[n.b. my posts are arriving in a weird order]
Jiri: MT>>Without a body, you couldn't understand the joke.
False. Would you also say that without a body, you couldn't understand
3D space ?
Jiri,
You have to offer a reason why something is "False" :). You're saying it's
that "3D space *can* be understood without a body"?
Er, false. Because....
1. Orientation Framework. Your ability to orient yourself in space - or to
understand references to orientation in space - e.g whether something is
"up" or "down" , "in" or "out", "towards" or "away", "here" or "there",
"on top of" or "underneath" or "upside down" or "right side up", "near" or
"far, "left" or "right," "over" or "under," or "going through" or "around" ,
"somewhere" or "nowhere" - as distinct from say just being a point[s] or
line[s] on a surface - all depend on having a body, and your capacity to
move that body in different directions (and understand other bodies as doing
the same).
(We are talking here about what might be called an "orientation framework" -
anyone got better ideas? - that is as fundamental to your navigation
through, and perception, of space, as Descartes' coordinate axes are to
geometry - and from which just possibly those axes may have evolved).
2. 3-D Geometry. Similarly, your ability to, and indeed incapacity to do
otherwise than, see and understand the lines in those classic depth
illusions as being smaller and "nearer" than the "further" ones, (when of
course they're actually the same size), depends on the embodiment of that
process, and your imaginatively, embodied-ly, travelling down the lines. The
whole of 3-d geometry is similarly embodied - at a certain "depth" from you
the viewer - who continually imaginatively and embodied-ly travel around its
objects and scenes.
3.Photographs of Physical Scenes and Objects. You cannot look at a physical
scene without seeing it as entailing a pov from a viewer. You cannot
understand how the objects within that scene are about to move - whether a
tipping bucket say is about to fall on someone going under the ladder or
ascend to heaven - without embodying those objects. You cannot understand
the "tipping" or the "falling" - or which direction even the objects are
moving in - without imaginatively, embodiedly projecting their movements
(despite their actual stillness on the page). You cannot look at a street
without "walking" down it.
4. Object-ification. Similarly, your remarkable ability to even conceive of
"objects" as you look around in real space, let alone a screen, depends on
having a body and being able to embody them. You don't actually see whole
objects as you experience cups/chairs/pencils etc. You just see v. partial
facades/surfaces - never the whole object. Objects have to be reconstructed
in the observing mind - an embodied process - which derives from your
physically having touched and/or travelled around them. [Hence, I guess,
touch and movement precede vision in the evolution of species/mind - and
blind people don't need vision to "see" and draw the outlines of objects]
5.Late Development of "Transcendental " Perspective. Your very capacity to
conceive of a disembodied mind out of space and time, whether in the form of
a computer or a divine entity or , say, some meditative process that steps
outside space and time - is a capacity that has to be developed over time
through childhood, pre-stage by pre-stage, from a primarily here and now
perspective. (Your whole concept of "disembodied" or "functionalism" or any
other variation, *presupposes* being "embodied"). See Margaret Donaldson:
Human Minds: An Exploration & the development of the Transcendent Mode,
summarised in:
http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Thompson.pdf
Well worth reading whole paper. V. important.
6. Understanding of Number and Operations on Numbers/Objects. Your very
ability to understand number and numerical operations like adding and
dividing, depends on your ability to embody them. You automatically
understand, for example, that 1 + 1 do NOT equal 2, if you are adding one
ice cream to another ice cream. You only came to numbers through your body,
and tallying and counting and physically conjoining, objects.
In fact, the whole of rationality - logic and maths and formal languages -
depend utterly on imagination and embodiment.
In fact, your entire worldview - your ability to conceive of the far
universe, and the deep interior of atoms and fundamental particles, and the
distant past of evolution and the big bang, and the distant future of AGI
or, pace "Death Race" - "2012: The US Economy Has Collapsed" - all depend
utterly on your capacity for imaginative, embodied projection, and space
and time "travel," way beyond the very narrow horizons of your immediate
environment.
Exciting, no?
It's best not to try to fight it, but to go with it, and better understand
the details.
P.S. What has emerged in this post for me is an interesting, single
concept - that our understanding of the world and representations of it,
depends on the "flying 'I'" - a flying embodied eye-and-body. What is
deceiving you, I suggest, is that you are taking all the pictorial and
verbal objects under discussion - geometrical lines and objects on a page,
shapes in a photograph, numbers on a page, objects in actual space -
literally - as if they really are entirely static [*like all things on book
pages*] and as if we, or any intelligence, can and need only look at and
think about them statically, In fact, to understand them we are continually
imaginatively moving around them. (Just my first thought, that last para).
But it is v. important here to understand the nature of the "disembodied"
illusions that are deceiving you/us and many if not most people.
P.P.S. Perhaps your/our v.ability to conceive of a disembodied mind/spirit
derives from the "flying I". Think of the classic illusion that we have
left our body and are looking down at ourselves from the wardrobe - as in a
dream at night - which I believe (comments?) Susan Blackmore showed
experimentally to be false.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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